Tough month for Brenda Snipes, but she's no Miriam Oliphant

This has been a tough month for the Broward Elections office, with hiccups at nearly every step of the voting process, but let's keep things in perspective.

Brenda Snipes is no Miriam Oliphant.

Snipes, who replaced the bumbling Oliphant as Broward elections supervisor in 2003 and won another term without opposition this year, needs to restore voter confidence after her office's worst performance ever. There were long lines, balky scanners, absentee ballots that never arrived, slow results and piles of ballots that cropped up way after Election Day.

Taken together, it looks bad, especially in a county that's so sensitive to voting issues after the 2000 recount and Oliphant's reign of error from 2001 to 2003. Fixes are clearly in order. Snipes will soon meet with Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner to offer input on what Tallahassee can do to help, including easing restrictions on early-voting hours and sites.

On the bright side, Snipes has dropped the defensive posture she initially took when pressed on missteps by Broward canvassing board member Ilene Lieberman. Snipes now seems amenable to working with the Broward County Commission to improve the voting system. She's going to need county money to buy more optical scanners, a key to reducing logjams and long lines on Election Day.

And Snipes should be more open to having county workers help with certain functions – like processing last-minute absentee ballots – to speed results instead of just relying on her own army of temporary workers.

When I asked Snipes, a former school administrator and a Democrat, to give her office a grade for the current election cycle, she declined.

Fine, I'll do it for her: C. More than 762,000 Broward residents voted, but it wasn't always smooth or pleasant.

"I understand why people are angry," she told me earlier this month. She said her office "got thrown off its game" with a lawsuit that allowed in-person absentee voting the Sunday and Monday before Election Day, days that were meant to prepare precincts and tabulate absentee ballots.

I feel for Snipes, and other big-county elections supervisors like Palm Beach's Susan Bucher, because they were dealt a bad hand by malevolent legislators and then the dominoes tumbled around them. Some things were beyond her control, like shortened early-voting hours and a ridiculously long ballot bogged down with 11 amendments.

But other problems were her own doing, like a post-election atmosphere that seemed confused and lackadaisical when it came to getting final results. Her crew didn't work through the night on Tuesday or Wednesday, despite thousands of absentee ballots that had to be processed. Snipes directed the county's canvassing board to quit relatively early on Election Night, before 1 a.m.

The focus seemed more on meeting the state's initial Nov. 10 reporting deadline than having results as quickly as possible.

After nearly a decade on the job with nary a critical word, Snipes' standing has taken a hit with Broward voters. But she's not in Oliphant territory yet.